Brownfields
Pittsburgh's brownfield sites can be turned into productive areas with new factories, housing, and other locations that service jobs and our overall landscape of being more productive. Make it easier to buy and clean up vacant brownfield sites within the city and put up businesses and housing that will add to the city's revenue stream. Right now, many of these sites are off the tax rolls. Let's get them back on the tax roles through renovation. But people won't buy these sites because they will be 100% responsible for the pollution caused by companies in past decades. Plenty of attention has been devoted to the brownfields on the rivers' edge. However many additional sites occur around the city that are not on the banks of a river. Those sites have been ignored. These are complicated sites to resolve and turn productive again. Generally, the sites are with too many frustrations and the easy sites get the attention. :St. Clair Village is a former site that used to be a massive housing complex. Most of it was torn down and not in use now. Broadhead Manor is another site with potential. My view, as a free-market advocate, presents a different framework and different sets of priorities. The free market, if restraint is ordered, will revive the city's obvious and easy development jobs. However, the city's agencies and local development companies should be pressed into action on the hardest, most delicate, challenges within our neighborhoods. :For example, two blocks from our home on the South Side is an old police station. Very little has been done with that property in 25 years. It sits among houses, without parking, and makes an interesting redevelopment struggle. I'd rather have local development company put their energies into taming the beasts and not doing new, upscale, riverside, townhoses that could appear in Murrysville. :The former police station and it's property might make a nice flex office space or site for some small businesses. An ad agency, local cater, pizza shop, ice-cream parlor, or just condos and residential use is possible. Easy jobs chug along with the speed of glaciers and the hard jobs never move an inch. I'd go to each local development agency and insist that brownfields join the most difficult projects at the top of our priority lists. If we in the public sectors begin to crack the big nuts, this will insure, with the new mayor's insistance, that the free market forces come in and handle the easy tasks. Environmental Plans Pittsburgh needs to think about new environmental plans. Environmental disputes. Libertarians advocated using tresspass law. Putting legal watchdogs onto pollution causing sources is expected. Our legal resources will be flush as we'll have a wider margin of litigation. Pitt's Law School Environmental Center A few years ago, the University of Pittsburgh Law School had a faculty member that established a center for environmental law. One of the early issues to be put onto that center's agenda was the plan for the Mon Valley Expressway (Tollway). When the lawyers began to get into the picture on the side of the citizens, the powerful pitched a fit to Pitt. A member of the PA Supreme Court placed a call to higher places so as to close down the center. Academic freedoms were put under question, among other ethical questions.